An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Saturday, August 6, 2016

Chicago Summer of ’68 Memoir—Monday—A Foggy Night

The Chicago Police--out of the fog at Lincoln Park.

Note:This
is the fifth installment in my series of memoir posts about the Democratic
Convention in Chicago in 1968 and my small role in the streets action
surrounding it.In today’s episode I encounter
Alan Ginsberg in a fog and other people get their heads cracked again.

Despite
the dismissive attitude of the SDSers
to the Yippies, I was eager to
rejoin the main protests that evening.After slapping together a quick dinner of hot dogs and beans for the few
kids not already out, I headed for Lincoln
Park where everyone expected another big confrontation.

It
was a chilly, damp night and pitch dark by the time I made the park on
foot.A thick fog rolled in off the Lake.The later it got, the thicker it got.There was no program, no performances, or speech making, at least where
I circulated.The crowd grew, milled
around, and tried occasional chants.The
enemy—the police—were invisible behind those fog banks.Some folks began to build barricades of park
benches, picnic tables and trash cans.That made me nervous, I moved away from them.

Not
long before 11 o’clock, my attention was drawn to drumming and a flickering
fire away from the main crowd.It was
further south, close to where La Salle
Street turned east-west and formed the edge of the park.My guess is that we were not far from Cardinal Cody’s mansion.It was hard to tell.And my memory might be faulty.

Alan Ginsburg in Lincoln Park.

As
I got close enough to see what was going on, I found a knot of maybe a couple
of hundred people.At the center,
sitting cross legged and looking serene, was Alan Ginsberg chanting “Om, Om, Om, Om, Om Mani Padme Om.”As he droned, the tension seemed to drain a
bit among those surrounding him even as the moments to a sure assault ticked
by.

Ginsberg was there with a posse of writers, supposedly as observers and
journalists, not demonstrators.With him
that night were the Beat novelist
and junkie William Burroughs, the French playwrightand novelist Jean Genet—always
described in the press as the “hoodlum poet”—and the American satirist Terry Southern.Of course, I could not have picked any of
them out of a line up.But Ginsberg was
easy to recognize.

I learned later from a story that Southern published in Esquire that the
band had arrived in the park not long before me after a day of drinking.

The park had a different feel than the night before.I almost forgot about the militants building
those barricades behind the banks of fog.But tension rose as 11 PM passed without apparent police action.

I’m not sure how much time passed, but eventually I decided to head
back to the Movement Center thinking that maybe the cops had decided to pass up
a battle in the fog.

Once again I was wrong. Not long after I was out of the area, teargas
mixed with the fog and formations of police attacked the makeshift barricades,
clubs swinging.Ginsberg and company
evidently eluded the police, but under cover of that fog some of the worst
beatings of the week were administered that night.Press members, especially photographers, were singled out and
attacked so successfully that I know of no pictures taken in the park that
night after the attack began.

Eventually
the cops once again pushed demonstrators out of the park and into the streets
of Old Town.They continued to fire tear gas in the
neighborhood.When local residents began
to offer shelter to fleeing protestors, cops stormed front porches and beat
them senselesson their own
doorsteps.

For the second night in a row I had missed the main battle.When the kids straggled into the Movement
Center with fresh horror stories, I began to feel like a deserter under
fire.

Important Note!--I have been informed that my memory was as foggy as that evening. The battle in the Fog occurred on Tuesday night, not Monday. When, hopefully, some day I can publish this as part of book straighten out the whole mess.